The Human Comedy, a vast series of some 90 novels and novellas by Honoré de Balzac, known in the original French as La Comédie humaine. The books that made up the series were published between 1829 and 1847.

Balzac’s plan to produce a unified series of books that would comprehend the whole of contemporary society was not clearly formulated until about 1834, although he had issued several volumes by that time. He elaborated three general categories of novels: Études analytiques (“Analytic Studies”), dealing with the principles governing human life and society; Études philosophiques (“Philosophical Studies”), revealing the causes determining human action; and Études de moeurs (“Studies of Manners”), showing the effects of those causes, and themselves to be divided into six kinds of scènes—private, provincial, Parisian, political, military, and country life. The entire project resulted in a total of 12 volumes published between 1834 and 1837. By 1837 Balzac had written much more, and by 1840 he had hit upon the comprehensive title La Comédie humaine. He negotiated with a consortium of publishers for an edition under this name, 17 volumes of which appeared between 1842 and 1848, including a famous foreword written in 1842. A “definitive edition,” including many new works, was published, in 24 volumes, between 1869 and 1876.

The whole is an examination of French society from the French Revolution to the eve of the Revolution of 1848, in which Balzac analyzed the underlying principles of this constantly developing world. Balzac ranged back and forth, often within the same novel, from the philosophical to the social, the economic, and the legal; from Paris to the provinces; and from the summit of society to the petite bourgeoisie.

No theme is more typically Balzacian than that of the ambitious young provincial fighting for advancement in the competitive world of Paris. Balzac was both fascinated and appalled by the French social system of his time, in which the bourgeois values of material acquisitiveness and gain were steadily replacing what he viewed as the more stable moral values of the old-time aristocracy.

These topics provided material largely unknown, or unexplored, by earlier writers of French fiction. Individuals in Balzac’s stories are continually affected by the pressures of material difficulties and social ambitions. They are capable of expending their tremendous vitality in ways Balzac viewed as socially destructive and self-destructive. Linked with this idea of the potentially destructive power of passionate will, emotion, and thought is Balzac’s peculiar notion of a vital fluid concentrated inside the person, a store of energy that can be husbanded or squandered at will. Indeed, most of Balzac’s characters are spendthrifts of this vital force, as can be seen in his many monomaniacs who are both victim and embodiment of some ruling passion: avarice, as in the main character of Gobseck (1835), a usurer gloating over his sense of power, or the miserly father obsessed with riches in Eugénie Grandet (1833); excessive paternal affection, as in the idolatrous Lear-like father in Le Père Goriot (1835); feminine vindictiveness, as evidenced in La Cousine Bette (1846; Cousin Bette) and a half-dozen other novels; the mania of the art collector, as in Le Cousin Pons (1847; Cousin Pons); the artist’s desire for perfection, as in Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (1831; The Unknown Masterpiece); the curiosity of the scientist, as in the fanatical chemist of Le Recherche de l’absolu (1834; The Quest of the Absolute); or the vaulting and frustrated ambition of the astonishingly resourceful criminal mastermind Vautrin in Illusions perdues (1837–43; Lost Illusions) and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1839–47; A Harlot High and Low). Once such an obsession has gained a hold, Balzac shows it growing irresistibly in power and blinding the person concerned to all other considerations.

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French literary artist Honore de Balzac is perhaps best known for La Comedie humaine (The Human Comedy), a vast series of more than 90 novels and short stories published between 1829 and 1847. In these works Balzac concentrated mainly on an examination of French society from the Revolution of 1789 to the eve of the 1848 Revolution. He linked realistic observation with visionary intuition, while at the same time seeking to analyze the underlying principles of his changing society. He ranged back and forth, often within the same novel, from the philosophical to the social, the economic, and the legal; from Paris to the provinces; and from the summit of society to the petit bourgeois.